Thursday, February 25, 2016

March is almost upon us and that means that Pilot season is in full swing. I wanted to share with you all a post from my late lamented original blog on the Upfront presentations that I attended at both NBC and FOX. That's the culmination of the pilot process. In the following weeks I hope to take you behind the curtain and share my adventures during the two weeks leading up to the presentations in New York City. These will be my experiences and may not reflect how it is being done at other networks or even how it is being done at FBC now that i have departed.

We'll take a look at:

How are pilots screened?

How are pilots tested and how is the data communicated to the program executives?

What goes on in the scheduling room?

So, while you're waiting with breathless anticipation, enjoy this appetizer.

Next
week the five broadcast networks descend upon New York City to peddle their
wares…BOMBS AWAY...here come the upfront presentations!!! Yippee!!! Now I've
attended quite a few of these puppies over the past thirty years. I was at the
Hilton for the legendary Brandon Tartikoff marathons. They would start at breakfast
and run for five plus hours. Back then I worked in research and Brandon would
invite me to help him prepare for the upfront presentation. I was there to help
him with the ratings (man did he love to put up the charts) but being the smart
ass that I was (and I guess still am) I would pitch him some jokes which were
generally met with cold stares from the Legendary Mr. Tartikoff. For example,
one year we were moving Quantum Leap to a new night and an earlier time period.
Brandon was looking for a hook for the move. I spoke up: “How about ‘If he can
leap through time he can leap through time periods’ “…cold stare. I was at
Carnegie Hall for NBC's 1991 upfront when Johnny Carson matter of factly told
the audience that he was leaving the Tonight show the following May. I was
sitting in the back of the hall with a colleague and we looked at each other
with these "Did we hear what we think we just heard" stares.

That
was Warren Littlefield's baptism of fire. During a chunk of the 90's Warren and
I (with help from Eric Cardinal our head of Program Research) would write the
presentations at 30 Rock over Mother's Day weekend...and we actually wrote them
on legal pads. Warren's assistant Patty Mann would type them up...we eventually
graduated to floppies but it was labor intensive.

I actually had an opportunity to write a
joke for Jerry Seinfeld. Here's the story: The presentation would generally
start with some sort of gag reel generally featuring Warren with our stars.
Then we would bring out our head of sales Larry Hoffner who would bring the
festivities to a crashing halt by droning on for several minutes. One year,
when we were in the middle of our four-season run as the #1 network, we were
going to have Jerry open the show after Larry's speech. We felt that Larry
would just kill the excitement of having one the biggest stars on network
television doing a monologue so I was given the thankless task of asking Larry
if he would defer from speaking. Fortunately Larry was fine with it. We told
Jerry that he would open the show and Jerry asked if he should say anything
about no Hoffner. I said, "Tell the audience Larry has no material".
HE USED IT!!!!!!! The next year Jerry again opened, Hoffner did not go on and
Jerry said Larry STILL didn't have any material. Fun times.

While
at FOX we have had some epic disasters. The first upfront presentation I
attended was on the Intrepid.... that’s right a freaking' boat on the Hudson
River in midtown Manhattan It was cold and fog horns were going off during the
presentation. There was one staircase leading from the upper deck to the party
below After Idol came along we did an upfront presentation where Gail Berman
tried to explain our three pronged scheduling strategy Year round scheduling….
sound familiar? We were mocked and ridiculed and then we went on to win seven
(or eight?) seasons in a row in the 18-49 demo.

Nothing
will top the disaster at the Armory on Lexington Avenue. The year before this
debacle we held our upfront at City Center and I guess there were some
complaints that important media buyers were given bad seats. George Oswald, our
events planner extraordinaire was tasked with finding a different venue. We
wind up in a fucking Armory on a hot muggy afternoon. It was 80 degrees and
humid inside,Brad Garrett made
some joke about banging Ryan Seacrest and Kiefer came out to tell everyone it
was pouring outside....the roof then started to leak. It was the most
disastrous upfront I ever attended.Which gets me to the point
of all this. I left the armory with a good friend in Programming, Craig Erwich.
We grabbed a cab to the Upper East Side for our party.... yet another disaster.
Craig was devastated. We do all this work and it's undermined by this crappy
presentation. I looked at him and said that none of this really matters....
it’s all bullshit.... the buyers will eat our shrimp and drink our booze and
then go back and watch the full pilots and share out the schedules. Sure we may
take a hit in the press and the trade publications for a day or so but so what.
I really believed that.

Guess
what? The media buyers, in spite of that abomination of an upfront presentation,
did not punish us. The following year we did the entire presentation in an hour
(and back at City Center). We got kudos not because we necessarily had better
shows, but because we got everyone to the booze and the shrimp quicker than in
prior years. That's all that really matters. I went on a jihad at work to do
away with the upfront presentation and just have a kick ass party in the
evening. Put everything else on line so that agencies can see the trailers and
we can give them a rationale for the schedule. It would save us quite a bit of
money, we would enter the 21st century and there would be no impact on what we
would bring in. Someone will do it but doesn't look like it will be us. So next
week all the networks will again lead with their chin. There will be talent to embarrass
us, trailers that fall flat, schedules that don't make sense, and shows that
will never make it to the Fall. I continue to wonder if it really matters. At
least Brandon knew how to put everyone to sleep for five hours

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Been a bit distracted so I realized that two series have aired three episodes, so before a new wave of Network premieres hits the "airwaves" let's quickly enter DC'S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW and LUCIFER into The Book of Life. Good news for both I believe.First here are the possible fates of new shows:BUY THE DELI PLATTER AND PAY A SHIVA CALL (stick a fork in it, it's done)WILL CELEBRATE THEIR B'NAI MITZVAH (will get to 13 on the air)LET'S GO TO A BRIS (the order will be snipped)SET A PLACE AT THE SEDER TABLE (should finish full the season)SEE YOU AT NEXT YEAR'S KOL NIDRE SERVICE (there's a second season)I'm pretty sure no official decision has been announced yet but I expect to see both shows at next year's Kol Nidre service or later for TuBiShvat, Purim or Passover.DC'sLOT is a no brainer as the CW continues to expand its DC Universe and I don't think we've seen the end of this expansion. As I have said on several occasions Network TV is a business of failure and the goal of network executives is to reduce the cost of failure and buy into success. Law and Order, NCIS and Dick Wolf's Chicago are all examples of increasing the chances of success in a series. For those who say this is uninspired programming my response is that the more you can program hours of a schedule with limited downside the more likely you are to keep something on the air that would often get cancelled. During the Must-See-TV years "Homicide: Life on the Street" was allowed to live on Friday nights for several years because so much of our schedule was so successful both in ratings and revenue.So kudos to the CW for building out this Universe and, hopefully this will allow them to leave "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" and "Jane the Virgin" alone on Monday nights. I would like that.I'm pretty sure we will also be seeing LUCIFER at next year's Kol Nidre service. Whereas the odds of DC'sLOT succeeding is built on being part of a successful franchise, LUCIFER's successful start come from two factors. Yeah scheduling still matters and putting the show behind "The X Files" followed by a stint behind "Gotham" goes a long way towards propping up LUCIFER's ratings until it can hopefully build its own audience.The other way that LUCIFER has increased its chance of success is by adhering to one of the most tried and true procedural formats: the He's a She's a....."Bones" "Rosewood" "Castle" "Limitless" "Elementary" "Sleepy Hollow" "iZombie" "Grimm" all follow this tried and true formula of a two person lead where one character is a member of law enforcement who is aided by a partner with a "super" power i.e they have a skill which aides in solving the crime of the week. Generally the partners are male/female. It doesn't work all the time (see the horrific Minority Report) but if it's cast well, incorporates some humor and a dollop of sexual tension these puppies can run for several seasons.Good leadin and a tried and true formula should keep LUCIFER around for a while even though it is a Warner Brothers show. With the success of "Gotham" (which, between you and me, returns with a string of really solid episodes.....AND PEE WEE!!!!!!!!) I have a feeling there will be a bit of horse trading going on between the outside studio and FOX.Again sorry of the delay but with new stuff on the horizon I want to make sure that the Book was updated before I have to go out for some deli platters.

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Here's an entry from my late lamented blog about the fear of failure and overthinking scheduling moves. It was inspired by an on sides kick in the Super Bowl. Enjoy

Last night Sean Payton made one of the ballsiest calls ever in a Super Bowl when the Saints
started off the second half of the game with an onside kick. This morning on
ESPN's "Mike and Mike Show" (yeah I listen to ESPN in the morning
rather than NPR.... sue me) Coach
Ditka, in talking about the call, praised Payton by saying that, rather than
approaching the play from a perspective of "what if this fails"
Payton starts from "what if it works". Success will come to those who are not
afraid to fail and that has always been the case in the world of scheduling. The biggest
obstacle to success that I have experienced in all my years playing this game
is paralysis by analysis. The more we talk about a scheduling move the less
likely it is to happen because at some point the discussion comes around to
"what if you're wrong?" “What if it fails?” That’s when I
know I'm fucked. Nobody's right all of the time and obviously the
riskier the move the greater the chance of failure, but to never do the crazy thing,
to never go out on the ledge, results in stagnation and failure.

The thing about television is you can always
unscramble the egg.... look at NBC
and Leno.... so I'm always willing to start from the perspective of what if
this works? The worst thing that can happen to me is I get fired and, trust me;
there are far worse things in life. In thinking about the Super Bowl play this
morning I remembered two (of many) scheduling moves that almost didn't happen
because of over thinking and naval contemplation. Thought I would share them
with you. In May '98, towards the end
of my NBC career we screened a pilot about a doctor who returns to her home
town of Providence RI, goes to work in a clinic and moves back in with her
father, a veterinarian. The pilot met with mixed reaction during the
screenings. I screened the pilot in a room with our head of press and publicity. She was visibly uncomfortable watching it. Providence
tested well and had enough support for it to be picked up as a mid-season
show. We did not get off to a
good start in the Fall 1998 and, as we were thinking about mid-season changes,
I suggested that we put Providence in the Friday 8pm slot since there appeared
to be nothing for "older" (25-54) women in the time period. We
watched several episodes and the consensus was that it was pretty good and
worth the shot.

The
January TCA (press critics) tour was coming up and our head of press and
publicity argued that we should delay putting Providence on the air until after
TCA. I heard the dreaded words "What if it fails". The thinking was
if it bombs that's more fuel for the fire among the television critics. I
argued back "what if it works?" it would give us a hit to rub in
their face and they hate us anyway so what's one more failure. Of course we
debated this for days (paralysis by analysis), which made it harder for the marketing people to get going with
promoting the show. We eventually decided to put it on before TCA and, guess
what? Providence turned out to be a success for NBC
and lived in the Friday 8pm time period for several seasons.

To this day I never found out why our press head
despised the show but the fun story was what Vince Manze and John Miller, the marketing guys did the day
after Providence opened to solid ratings. Tom Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post hated the show and in his
review noted that this was the latest in a string of horrible shows coming out
of the Peacock. He ended his review with this sentence: "NBC has done it
again". Vince and John took that sentence and used it as the closing quote
in a promo touting the fact that NBC had a new hit on its hands. Needless to
say Shales went batshit and we had to pull the promo.

A
few years later I'm at FOX. In the May 2003 upfront Sandy Grushow brought out three actresses and David E. Kelly
to talk about a show that had not yet been shot.....Girls Club. The thinking was that, on the strength of David E.
Kelly's pedigree, we could sell the media buyers on the show. We did have a
script so we were only 80% insane to do this. Girls Club was simply awful and
that was reflected in the ratings.

That summer our head of unscripted Mike Darnell
pitched a small group of us the concept of a dating show where the
bachelorettes were told that the bachelor
was a millionaire when, in fact, he was dirt poor. We needed to keep the
conceit quiet while it was being filmed but we all thought that this one could
be big and noisy. We needed to put a January schedule together since this was
the first year American Idol would be on in season. I pitched the idea of shitcanning Girls Club and putting Joe Millionaire in the
Monday 9pm slot. Darnell was convinced that the powers that be would never
agree to that move i.e. giving an unscripted show a choice prime time slot. To
our surprise Gail Berman and Sandy bought into it and I assumed we were set. Wrong.

A few days after announcing the schedule changes
we found ourselves sitting in a room with some senior FOX execs to do a little
paralysis by analysis. We were told how much better off we would be with the
low rated Girls Club than with swinging for the fences with an audacious
reality show. Then the dreaded words were uttered: "Do you know how much
money we will lose if this fails?" Again all I could do was look at the
big boys and say "But what if it's a huge success?""Well that would be a different story" they said. We stood our ground and with Idol, Joe Millionaire and the move
of 24 to mid-season (another classic case of paralysis by analysis) FOX won its
first sweep and has been on a solid run ever since.

I could site other examples but I'll just say
props to Sean Payton and the Saints. An example to us all of aiming for success
and putting thoughts of failure on the sidelines.